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Mapping Unwed Motherhood

By Catherine Rampell May 2, 2013 12:54 pmMay 2, 2013 12:54 pm

The share of births to unmarried mothers is up, according to a new report from the Census Bureau.

In 2011, of the women who reported having had a birth in the previous 12 months, 35.7 percent were unmarried. That number has been tracked in the American Community Survey since 2005, when 30.6 percent of recent births were to unmarried women.

“Nonmarital fertility has been climbing steadily since the 1940s and has risen even more markedly in recent years,” Rose Kreider, a family demographer with the Census Bureau and one of the report’s authors, said in a news release accompanying the report.

Rates of out-of-wedlock births vary tremendously by demographics like age and education. Among women 20 to 24 years old, for example, 62 percent of those who gave birth in the previous 12 months were unmarried. Among those 35 to 39, the share was 17 percent. The rate of births out of marriage were also lower for women with higher income and more education.

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The numbers varied by race as well. Among black women who had a birth in the last year, more than two-thirds (68 percent) were not married. The share for Asians was 11 percent; for non-Hispanic whites, 26 percent; and for Hispanics, 43 percent.

Here’s a map showing the rates by state/district:

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Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2011 American Community Survey.Credit

Washington, D.C. had the highest percentage of women with a birth in the previous year who were unmarried (51 percent), followed closely by Louisiana (49 percent), Mississippi (48 percent) and New Mexico (48 percent). The states with the lowest percentages were Utah (15 percent) and New Hampshire (20 percent).

The broader New York City metro area, which is the site of a controversial new ad campaign trying to discourage teenagers from having children, has a rate slightly lower than that for the country as a whole (31.4 percent).

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